Brief Bio: I received a bachelor's degree in Physics from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi in 1997 and another one in Computation from the University of Oxford in 2000 on a Rhodes Scholarship. I then stayed on at Oxford on a University Scholarship and obtained a DPhil in Engineering in 2004. Before joining Microsoft Research I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at MSRI Berkeley. My research interests lie in the areas of machine learning and computer vision.

Research

I am interested in the following research areas

• Multiple Kernel Learning
• Object Recognition
• Feature Selection
• Feature Extraction and Low Level Vision
• Reading Text in Images
• Texture Classification

If you would like to apply for an internship at Microsoft Research India then please e-mail me directly. This is better than applying online as it'll ensure that I notice, and go through, your application. However, I still might not be able to respond to each e-mail in person. Internships are open throughout the year and typically last between 3 to 6 months (though this is quite flexible).

If you are interested in computer vision or machine learning research supervision at IIT Delhi then please come and meet me (Room 437, Bharti Building) or e-mail me directly. IIT offers PhD Studentships in collaboration with MSR India. Please look at the CSE Department web pages for more details and other funding opportunities.

Links

• The 2010 Winter School on Machine Learning and Computer Vision
• [Teaching 2009] CSL 864 - Special Topics in AI

Publications

• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. A statistical approach to material classification using image patch exemplars. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence , 31(11):2032--2047, November 2009.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• A. Vedaldi, V. Gulshan, M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Multiple Kernels for Object Detection. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision, Kyoto, Japan, September 2009.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format | Code



• M. Varma and B. R. Babu. More generality in efficient multiple kernel learning. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, Montreal, Canada, pages 1065--1072, June 2009.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format | Code



• T. E. de Campos and B. R. Babu and M. Varma. Character recognition in natural images. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, Lisbon, Portugal, February 2009.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format | Download English and Kannada datasets



• M. Varma and D. Ray. Learning the discriminative power-invariance trade-off. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 2007.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format | www | Code | Errata
  Please see the errata regarding the Caltech experiments



• M. Varma and R. Garg. Locally invariant fractal features for statistical texture classification. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 2007.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• N. Adabala and M. Varma and K. Toyama. Computer aided generation of stylized maps. Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 18(2):133--140, May 2007.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. A statistical approach to texture classification from single images. International Journal of Computer Vision: Special Issue on Texture Analysis and Synthesis, 62(1--2):61--81, April 2005.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Unifying statistical texture classification frameworks. Image and Vision Computing, 22(14):1175--1183, December 2004.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma. Statistical Approaches To Texture Classification. DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, October 2004.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format (~18 Mb)



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Estimating illumination direction from textured images. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Washington, DC, volume 1, pages 179--186, June 2004.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Texture classification: Are filter banks necessary? In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Madison, Wisconsin, volume 2, pages 691--698, June 2003.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Statistical approaches to material classification. In Proceedings of the Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, Ahmedabad, India, pages 167--172, December 2002.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Classifying materials from images: to cluster or not to cluster? In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Texture Analysis and Synthesis, Copenhagen, Denmark, pages 139--144, June 2002.
  Bibtex source | Abstract



• M. Varma and A. Zisserman. Classifying images of materials: Achieving viewpoint and illumination independence. In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Computer Vision, Copenhagen, Denmark, volume 3, pages 255--271. Springer-Verlag, May 2002.
  Bibtex source | Abstract | Download in pdf format



• M. Varma and V. S. Varma. Computer simulation of evolution. In Proceedings of the GIREP-ICPE International Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia, pages 138--150, August 1996.
  Bibtex source